He killed himself in his studio in 1970. Who knows why? Who knows why he chose that moment to make his exit?
I don’t guess it’s anyone’s business. I can’t say that I vehemently disagree with a person taking their life, for everyone owns their own life, don’t they? They can do with it what they choose. If someone needs to go, then we should let them go.
It isn’t easy to swallow the idea that someone you love would voluntarily leave the planet. Our egos don’t like to accept that we aren’t enough to keep them here. We don’t like to accept that they were in so much pain, that that pain was larger than anything else and we won’t ever fully understand why. And even though it may not be our business, we’d like to know in most cases. That’s the problem with suicide, even if one has no moral or religious issues with it as a path to relief. Someone can take himself out, fine, but they leave behind those who love them with a never-ending list of questions and a shadow hanging over everything, like a dark triptych in the middle of the room.
WHEN DADDY DECIDED TO RUN FOR CIRCUIT CLERK OF Washington County in 1982 we were all surprised. He had shown no interest in being involved in politics, and an election required him to be out among people and to campaign. It was a strange impulse, I think. I am still desperate to understand him.
He came home one day with a box of business cards announcing his candidacy. I couldn’t help but run my fingers over their smooth, clean edges and admire the way they fit into their container so neatly, so perfectly. Our family spent that summer on the campaign trail in Washington County with Daddy. I was in between fifth and sixth grades and Sissy was in between eighth and ninth. Mama and Daddy had given up the restaurant.
The restaurant had been another thing they took a stab at. The business before had involved making woodcrafts, which they started out of the barn. Mama had quit her job as a legal secretary at the Washington County courthouse right before they began that venture—meanwhile Daddy kept his job at the courthouse—and decided to stay home awhile. I never did get the full story on that; she just picked us up from school in Chatom one afternoon with her car full of things from her office—legal pads, stationery, pens, pencils, rubber bands, paper clips—she cleaned the joint out. There were some later murmurings about something having happened at work, but I don’t know what and I’m not sure I trust the mouths the murmurings came from, but who knows? Everyone is human. Maybe something did happen.
Mama and Daddy bought all kinds of equipment for the woodworking outfit—band saws, a lathe—expensive tools they had to take a Small Business Administration loan out to buy. Mama made mostly simple, novelty items—wooden ducks, pigs, and such—but she could get fancy when she wanted to. She made me a wooden dollhouse for Christmas in 1981 that had different wallpaper in each tiny room, hand-carved cedar shingles, and a stained-glass window. I used to hear them talk about the SBA loan payment being ninety-one dollars a month. All of the equipment collected dust soon enough. The loan didn’t. It wasn’t paid off until after they died.
They were always looking for something. I know they had dreams—everyone does, every couple does—but I was never clear on what theirs were. They just took cracks at this thing and that thing, making ends meet somehow in between and hoping they’d hit a good lick at something eventually.
After they gave up on that venture, they leased the restaurant in the spring of my fifth-grade year. It was called the Airway—a little diner that was situated on the side of Highway 43 between Wagarville and Jackson and mostly served as a stopping place for the truckers who took that route back and forth on the short hauls they’d make every day. For whatever reason, Mama and Daddy couldn’t make it succeed despite her long hours and what looked like extreme efforts. She’d wake up at four in the morning, get herself ready, and drive to Wagarville in time to open the doors at six a.m.
Everyone pitched in to try to make it work. Nanny made pies for her to sell slices of. Sissy and I bused tables after school. Mama hired her cousin Terri to waitress and Mama waited on tables too. Sissy and I loved the jukebox and would take quarters out of the cash register to play our favorite records. A grilled cheese was three dollars and a hamburger was five. I’d see Mama working on the bookkeeping every night in the little office to the side of the bar before she’d leave after she locked up; Daddy would often pick Sissy and me up from school in Chatom in the afternoons then deposit us with her at the Airway—who knows where he got off to. Mama even missed my piano recital that year because she was at the restaurant, but she made sure I had a new dress to wear.
The dress was white-and-red Swiss dot—sleeveless with a white cotton bib collar trimmed in red lace. It had a set-in belt that tied with a big bow in the back. I wore it with the prettiest white strappy sandals with a low wooden heel, and I tied red grosgrain ribbons onto barrettes to hold my hair back on each side of my crooked bangs, which I kept trimmed myself and turned under every morning with the curling iron. I played “Für Elise” that year, which Daddy called “Furry Fleas.” He’d grin when he’d say it. Now it surprises me that he knew what my piece was. I hate when I feel like I have to give a person credit for doing something that seems like it ought to be a given, for having a ground-zero sense of decency.
Daddy found Mama trapped in a coat closet in their bedroom one morning before she went to the restaurant. She was so exhausted from the long hours and no rest that she got confused and thought she was walking into the bathroom for her morning shower. She had instead walked into the coat closet just beside the door that led to the hallway and couldn’t figure out how to get back out through the dark and what was hanging on the rod. Daddy had to pull her out. They decided that the restaurant business wasn’t right for them around that time. All that was left of it by the beginning of the circuit clerk campaign was a huge block of cheese slices that sat in our refrigerator and a few industrial-sized boxes of aluminum foil and Saran wrap that we used in the house for at least a year after the last night Mama hung the closed sign on the door and then drove away.
Her absence takes up more space in my memory than her presence. I can’t get a good hold on who she was because the truth is, I didn’t really know that much. But I watched her closely and have all of her little details stored carefully in my mind. I hold on to them.
Mama was a small person, only five foot four or so with size five feet, but her presence was naturally large. She was like sunshine that God sprinkled a little bit of salt on. She even smelled like that, good, like laundry dried on the line with an added bit of spice. She was full of soul, sparkle, and took up a sizable spot in every room she entered. She seemed lively and strong, even radiant sometimes when we were outside the house and she could let go of her constant worry a little bit. But she was terrified at home. I didn’t know the person she was without Daddy, so I don’t know when or how it happened, but I know his slow erasure of her didn’t happen overnight.
I think he was proud of her—he thought she was beautiful—but he was jealous of her ease in the world and jealous of anyone who caught her attention or even wanted to. He was certain there was someone around every corner who would steal her away from him. He wanted the authority to approve her every action. She didn’t like that he had it, but he did. She gave it to him because she didn’t know how not to. I don’t know why. He didn’t like women who spoke too much or showed an excess of personality. He didn’t like competition. Everyone loved her. So he shrank her. He shrank her until she almost disappeared. She decided that she didn’t want to disappear anymore. Then he disappeared her for good. No more speaking too much, no more personality, no more competition, no more chance that she might possibly have a life outside of the one she had with him.
Having complete control over her was the only thing that would satisfy him. No one should have that sort of power over another.
Agency and sewing scissors put to good use
Agency: the capacity of an individual to act independently—to engage effectively. Would that Mama had any she felt sure of.
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I saw a bit emerge during the spring of 1986.
Daddy had come home late again from carousing. Mama was up early as usual, and I’m sure was about to put a load of dirty laundry in the washer when she discovered his white button-down shirt at the bottom that had orangey-colored makeup caked all over its collar and shoulder. I walked into the kitchen just in time to see her go at it with her Gingher sewing scissors—the ones she told us never to use for cutting paper.
She held it up by the collar and stabbed at it, making vertical incisions and ripping it lengthwise to shreds while saying through her clenched teeth, “The next time you come home with makeup on your shirt you’ll be in it when I do this.”
She then attached the shirt to the wall by stabbing the scissors into it one last time, jabbing the whole unholy mess into the cheap paneling of the trailer, right there by the washing machine. It hung limply, a pitiful drunk’s raggedy-assed talisman to commemorate the aftermath of another drunken night out.
He just slunk off into the bedroom. I don’t know why he’d gotten up in the first place unless she woke him. I don’t know what I missed before I walked into the kitchen, but he knew he was caught.
I do wonder why Mama cared at that point in their marriage. I guess she could still get jealous. I guess there was still at least a part of her that wondered why he stayed gone so much at night, a part of her that still hoped she’d be loved and valued. Or maybe she was just mad that he was stupid enough to think she wouldn’t notice a wadded-up shirt in the bottom of the washing machine. Maybe she was mad that he’d put it in there but then didn’t care enough to actually wash it and instead left it for her to take care of. Maybe she was mad that he didn’t know how to take care of his own dirty laundry.
I wish I’d seen her mad more often.
Purse
I don’t remember her purse. I don’t remember what sort of purse she carried when she died and that’s a detail I wish I could bring forth. That I can’t makes me feel uneasy. Her purse was always a source of great excitement and mystery. She always had Doublemint gum in it, usually a big Wrigley’s PlenTPak. She would only ever chew a half piece instead of a whole. She said you didn’t need a whole piece, and that chewing that much gum at once made you look like a cow chewing its cud. Her wallet, loose change, wadded-up Kleenex, paper clips, various lipsticks and makeup with which to do touch-ups, to-do and grocery lists, bills, her checkbook—all of it smelled like her. I never knew what made her particular smell until later. There was always an unidentifiable agent mixed in with her natural goodness, the smell of an office, and whatever perfume or smellance she was wearing. Now I know it was cigarette smoke. I knew she smoked a little but now I think it was more than a little. She’d be happy to know that I never chew a whole piece of gum, lest I look like one of those cows she used to refer to as she tore off a half piece and gave it to me.
Photographs in shades of brown and ground rattlers
I don’t know when she became depressed.
That photograph of her standing outside the chicken coop that I think is from Christmas 1975 makes me think it grabbed her around the throat and started slowly choking the life out of her even that early. She is wearing clothes the colors of different varieties of mud—a dark brown turtleneck, pants that I’m sure she called tan—even her hair is dark and not one of the shades of blonde that I remember her always having. She just looks sad. Resigned. Older than thirty-one.
Sissy and I are in the pen playing with the chickens. Mama is outside the gate with her hands up, fingers around the chicken wire, looking straight into the camera with a gaze that says “I’d rather be anywhere but here.” Daddy must’ve taken the photo. I wonder what happened the night before? Holidays were never happy. Had they fought about going to Nanny and PawPaw’s for Christmas lunch? Or down the hill to Mammy and Dandy’s? It was always something. Something bubbling or boiling over, or the subsequent mop-up.
I wish someone had dragged her out of there and hidden her from him.
Just around the corner from the chicken coop—which was torn down after we didn’t have chickens anymore, and I think that was before I started first grade in Chatom—was the back of Daddy’s workshop. There was a sink there that he used for cleaning fish and such, and we were all standing in the yard beside it one summer night while he was cleaning some he’d gotten out of one of the traps he put in the creek every summer. I was probably ten or eleven.
He discovered a nest of ground rattlers next to where the dog pen used to be, not too far from the back door of his workshop. The dog pen where our rooster, Rojo, had died years earlier because he somehow got in there and the dogs tortured him, pulling all of his tail feathers out until he couldn’t stand up. Daddy wrung his neck when he got home that afternoon.
The snake nest scared us all, particularly Mama. She was terrified of snakes. Daddy destroyed the nest, which was full of babies, but told us all to be careful because where there are babies there is a mother, and ground rattlers don’t give a warning of their whereabouts like a regular rattler does.
We all made mental notes of this, and Daddy went back to cleaning his fish as we stood around keeping our eyes peeled for the angry mother snake that was sure to come take her revenge for her dead young. She didn’t show that we could see, but Daddy, in his reckless and usual fashion, threw a handful of fish guts across the yard for the cats to feast on and it hit Mama on her bare leg. She jumped and shrieked and ran toward the house, crying while Daddy laughed hysterically and slapped his knee with the ball cap he’d taken off his balding head. Sissy and I followed her to the bathroom, where she turned on the water and got in the tub in her clothes. She rubbed at her leg and rocked and cried. Sissy and I watched, afraid.
Slump
There are photographs from her next-to-last summer, when we went to Nashville in 1985 to make that record at Gene Breeden’s studio, that have the same feel as the one by the chicken coop from Christmas of 1975, albeit even darker. There’s even one of her standing by a display case of antique rifles at the Opryland Hotel that makes me shudder. Mama’s hair is different from when she was younger and the years show on her face a little, but the look of “I wish I could disappear” is even deeper.
Water Dog
The book always caught my eye because it had a royal-blue spine and white block-letter text. I think Sissy has Daddy’s copy. He had a black Labrador named Coal before he decided to get Bullet, the Blue Heeler.
Water Dog: Revolutionary Rapid Training Method, it says, by Richard A. Wolters, author of Gun Dog and Family Dog. Inside the jacket: The first book written for the man with limited time who wants to train a working retriever fast and who wants to train it himself.
I only vaguely remember Coal. I was told Daddy gave him to a man who did a lot of duck hunting, and who had more time to work with Coal than Daddy did.
I was in Annapolis, Maryland, on August 12, 2011, and stepped into a used bookstore just down from the venue that I was to play that evening. I spotted their copy of Water Dog right away. Mama and Daddy had been dead for exactly twenty-five years that day. I attached a meaning to its presence as I always do to such things, so I bought the book. I alphabetize my books by author’s last name. Water Dog is cataloged next to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski, funnily enough, a novel about a family who breeds dogs.
DADDY WAS UNEMPLOYED FOR A FEW YEARS AFTER HE lost the circuit clerk election in 1982. The night before I started seventh grade and Sissy started tenth at our new school in Jackson, we sat out on the side porch with him and Mama for a little while looking at the sky. We’d still see heat lightning even as late as Labor Day and every so often we’d spot a shooting star. I wondered out loud what I should say the next day when I was asked where my daddy worked. I knew I’d be asked. That’s the way things were there.
“Tell them I’m an independent landowner.”
He stayed gone a lot during that time. He said he was looking for work. He did get a teaching job in Grove Hill, w
hich is just up the road from Jackson, in the spring of 1984, but got fired after two days. He reportedly removed a smart-mouthed student from his classroom by the back of the neck and was promptly dismissed for it. He stayed gone all night that night, finally showing his face the following morning. Mama was distraught. Sissy and I asked her what happened the next day, and she broke down while holding on to one of the beams that held the roof over the patio while she told us. She said something about not knowing where our next meal would come from.
Daddy started staying gone again.
We never went hungry and were never in danger of doing so, to my knowledge. Dandy and PawPaw would both slip hundred-dollar bills into Mama’s hand for groceries or gas money from time to time. They knew. She might’ve hated taking it—in fact, I’m sure she did—but the idea that we wouldn’t have what we needed wasn’t true. That’s not the way our family was.
The Backbone
There are things that require no recalling. They are here in the morning, they are here in the evening, they are here in my chest. They are knocked loose and into my mind by a stack of magazines on the floor beside my reading spot, the crossword puzzle in the newspaper, the color of an eggplant, the smell of morning on a work coat, red suede moccasins, buying new clothes in the fall right before school starts, cheese toast that’s burned a little bit on the top on a well-used baking sheet, a bowl of fried okra, a plate of sliced tomatoes with the perfect amount of salt scattered on them, biscuits wrapped up in a dishtowel, a handwritten letter in the mailbox, a reassuring touch on my shoulder, a safe place to sleep, a homemade dress, two o’clock thunderstorms in the summer, hurricanes, the hum of a window unit, bare feet in the grass, intestinal fortitude, love, and esperance simmering in the pot on the stove.
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